When we first started planning the idea for our video, there was a vague image in our heads of what it would look like. Whilst researching, we found this video below.
When we first watched this video, we knew that we wanted to create something similar to this, but improve on it's weaker points.
Some of the shots in this aren't as strong as they could be. From this video, as well as being inspired we also learnt what works and what doesn't. For instance, the use of the out of focus slowly focusing, while establishing location, we felt that worked well, but the other uses of out of focus didn't work so well.
From this video is where the idea of amplifying some of the lyrics, such as "I feel like walking the world".
And from the original video, "she holds you captivated in her palm". We wanted to emulate the amplification from these videos but have our own take on them.
We were also inspired by the general upbeat tone of the remake and the original video. The natural lighting in the video helped us achieve this, along with playing in the leaves and the dancing.
We have used and developed a lot of the ideas from the remake video by watching this video and ours, it is clear that we have been influenced by the video.
The genre that the original artist, KT Tunstall has been labelled as is indie pop. We felt that this label was too broad and didn't really fit the style of music. Thus, we came up with the "BBC pop" genre name. The genre is still has all the same conventions of indie pop but artists in the indie pop genre would be featured in magazines such as NME as it appeals to that audience however, with KT Tunstall, we felt that the readers of NME wouldn't listen to her as her sound is very mainstream. BBC pop is a label of genre that would actually exist if the BBC produced music. Such as Disney find "child stars" and have them produce music, it is widely known as disney music.
BBC pop is suitable for all ages; carries connotations of being bright, colourful, fresh, happy and suitable for radio play and having very very little to no profanities.
As this genre doesn't actually exist in common terminology, but follows the same conventions of the indie pop genre we mostly followed the conventions of indie pop.
In many pop music videos were women are the artists making the music, the women wear little clothes and are heavily made up, such as in the Katy Perry California Girls music video. In this video she is wearing revealing clothes and is dressed up like a piece of candy insinuating that she is good enough to eat. From this video alone, it would seem as if Katy Perry doesn't write her own music as it is very produced and the lyrics don't seem to really have any meaning. It would seem as if the record company helped write this song so that they could market Katy Perry as being from California, a place where they have a lot of fun.
On the other end of the scale, we have Kate Nash with Mouthwash. In this song and video, it is clear that she at least plays the music herself and the lyrics really suggest that she wrote it herself as it is about herself and her physical appearance.
In the video, we see her wearing a pretty dress with sleeves while sometimes wearing dresses are considered to be worn for special occasions, it is clear that she is wearing the dress as it's the type of thing she wears on a regular basis, it is her smart casual.
In our video, the artist wore casual colour co-ordinated clothes. For the majority of the video she wore a lot of blue, and while playing guitar, she wore a vintage looking jumper, jeans and the same plain white converse as she did before.
Other factors that follow the conventions of the genre are the upbeat feel/feel-good-ness of the video. This was achieved by showing the artist to be fun and playful in natural surroundings such as when playing in the leaves. By doing this, it breaks down the barrier between the artist and the audience. It makes the audience feel closer to the artist.
By featuring so much nature and raw it gave the video a fresh and natural feel that filming infront of a green screen is mostly, incapable of doing.
We followed the conventions of editing we edited to the beat had we have done other wise, it would've looked off and changed the whole tone of the video.
We followed a lot of conventions, however, we challenged the convention of (representation/ethnicity). Songs like this are generally played by white middle class women in their mid 20's instead of a mixed race teenager. By having a mixed race teenager sing this is breaks the stereotype as in society today, mixed race teenagers are often stereotyped to singing R'n'B by artists such as Rihanna and Nicki Minaj.
2) How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
I think that the digipak and the advert work very well together. They feature the same photo of the artist with the same nebula background running throughout both of them. They also feature the same font and font colour. Although on the advert there are three other shades of purple, it is clear that the main colour is purple.
As this advert is an advert for the whole album, not just the single, there is little reference to the single but there is a direct link between the advert and the album. On the inside of the digipak there is a photo of a clip from the video (below)
After watching the video and then seeing an advert on the way to hmv, it would be clear that it’s the same person as they are wearing the same sort of clothes and the trademark bandana that she wore in every single shot she was in apart from one. Then once inside of hmv and looking for any other album and then happen to come across the same one the audience member would remember the face from the advert and the same text and colour and then they would think back to the video where they saw that same distinguishing bandana.
I that the target audience would be attracted to these products because it follows a lot of the main conventions such as the upbeat feel of the video and also because it shows the artist playing her own music and not dressing down for media attention which for many women especially is an important thing that other women don’t have to flaunt their sexuality to get noticed. Also, I feel that by breaking the ethnicity convention it widens the target audience as young mixed race and black teenagers would become interested in this as it
3) How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
Throughout this project we've used many many different forms of media to research, plan and to produce the three projects.
We did our research using such sites a google and wikipeida. We used google to search for artists in the same genre as ours and then on to wikipedia to read about them and their songs. Possibly after reading about them we would go onto youtube to watch a video by them. We searched videos in youtube by genre and certain artists that we knew were in the same genre or had really interesting videos.
For instance, we had an idea for having something in stop motion, so we searched stop motion and this video Her Morning Elegance by Oren Lavie came up.
Below are some screen caps from my favourite parts of the video.
From watching the videos on youtube, we learnt about the conventions of the genre and by watching videos by other bands and artists, we learnt about what you typically see in music videos. We watched videos from all different genres from all over to help us gather a range of ideas for our own video.
Youtube has been very helpful to our project as without youtube, we would have very little information about other bands and artists in the same genre and their music videos.
Using the internet is a very quick and almost always reliable way of gathering information in lots of interesting media formats. Searching anything in google millions of results on the topic searched in seconds which leaves us to take our pick from anyone of these sites to gather information from as each different site would have different information, more or less information on the topic we need, if there wasn't enough or not what we were looking for we would simply move on to another website.
We used other websites such as wikipedia and artist websites to help us gather ideas for that we wanted to do use in our video. We watched a lot of videos by other artists in our genre and other genres so that we would know what the "norm" in music videos is and also to see what works well and what doesn't.
We would search for an artist in google and the first few pages that would come up, depending on the artist would be, the artist page and the wikipedia page.
Below is a search in wikipedia of Katy Perry as an example page for other artist pages.
Once searched an artist in google their wikipedia page will probably come up. Alternatively, you can search in wikipedia for the artist on the wikipedia home page.
The contents box was the most useful part of the entire wikipedia page every time. It is where you can directly go to a certain thing that you want to see, for instance the one that I often used was discography which then leads us onto different albums and songs that the artist has released which then we would go and search the video in youtube to see what the song was like, and the video.
We used blogger to blog about our planning, research and even this evaluation that you are reading right now.
This is the header of when editing and creating a blog post.
Through blogger we are able to upload photos, videos, post videos and create links in the post.
Through blogger we are able to upload photos, videos, post videos and create links in the post.
In blogger we can also change the font, size of the text, text colour, highlight things and change the alignment of the text.
Furthermore we can use: - bullet points
- numbered bullet points
and indents
While making the music video, we used brand new HD JVC GY100U cameras.
We also used tripods to get a straight shot and to keep the camera steady. Before we could begin filming for our actual music video we
We also used tripods to get a straight shot and to keep the camera steady. Before we could begin filming for our actual music video we
Along with using these, we used 16GB fujifilm SD cards that would hold all the footage we captured we had two incase we ran out of space on one and we could use the other to film.
During filming, we used my Canon 550D camera and 8GB HD SanDisk memory card to take photos.
Once we had finished film the music video we used final cut pro to edit everything together. Before we had even began filming and planning for our music video, we shot and filmed a short music video for the song He's the Greatest Dancer by Sister Sledge (below)
We used this as the cameras provided by college were not as high quality as my own so I brought mine in so that we could take pictures while filming.
In this exercise, we learnt how to sync the song to the video.
It is done by while filming the person lip syncing, singing along with a playing track of the song. This makes it easier when editing instead of having to watch the lips to mark a word. Both the track and the audio of the video were marked to a single word in the song this made it easier so we wouldn't have to do it for every base track as we had many.
It is done by while filming the person lip syncing, singing along with a playing track of the song. This makes it easier when editing instead of having to watch the lips to mark a word. Both the track and the audio of the video were marked to a single word in the song this made it easier so we wouldn't have to do it for every base track as we had many.
In our video, we used time lapse this is done by changing the speed of the selected clip. We made the clip faster, first we tried 2000% and it worked very well but it lagged very badly after that we tried lower percentages to get the one we used in the video without it lagging at all.
To produce the digipak and advert, I downloaded a trail of photoshop CS5 so that I could become more familiar with photoshop learn to use it better also so that I could work from home.
Because I was a complete novice at using photoshop, I resorted to using the internet to show me how to do things; Such as I had forgotten from last year how to merge a photo with another. I google searched and I found such sites as this which helped me and from sites like those, I was able to have a nebula background.
4) What have you learnt from your audience feedback?
Above is a video of the audience feedback.
I conducted some interviews and some people said that the mise en scene in montage of faces could be improved as it's tonally different to the entire video. As in the rest of the video, everything surrounding the artists is bright, colourful and natural in the background in the montage, it's just plain white and that sets that part of the video apart from everything else.
The members of the audience that I interviewed also picked up on the fact that at the beginning of music video, you can see down the artists top and even if it is for only a second or two, it is inappropriate. They also picked up on the out of syncness of some of the parts in the video.
I conducted some interviews and some people said that the mise en scene in montage of faces could be improved as it's tonally different to the entire video. As in the rest of the video, everything surrounding the artists is bright, colourful and natural in the background in the montage, it's just plain white and that sets that part of the video apart from everything else.
The members of the audience that I interviewed also picked up on the fact that at the beginning of music video, you can see down the artists top and even if it is for only a second or two, it is inappropriate. They also picked up on the out of syncness of some of the parts in the video.
From this audience feedback, I have learnt that more care needs to be taken when reviewing what's in sync and what's not, also, that however nice some shots are, the mise en scene maybe perhaps be too plain when in relation to the rest of the video. I've also learnt that some shots and angles just don't work and are inappropriate. I personally, didn't realise this until it was too late.
The people that I interviewed were all media students or all studied media, and these people were apart of the forced audience. When making this music video, we knew that they would be watching this, however they are not the target audience.
For example Jasmine in the video above likes to listen to K-pop she is most certainly not in our target audience.
Members of our target audience would perhaps find other things that could be improved on and wouldn't comment on others as they wouldn't notice them for instance, I highly doubt that a member of our target audience would comment on shots we've used.
For example Jasmine in the video above likes to listen to K-pop she is most certainly not in our target audience.
Members of our target audience would perhaps find other things that could be improved on and wouldn't comment on others as they wouldn't notice them for instance, I highly doubt that a member of our target audience would comment on shots we've used.
